InCommon metadata problem now fixed - how to detect in the future

[Cantor, Scott]

On 2/25/15, 9:49 PM, "Clayton" <upnyhgb8v6 at snkmail.com> wrote:



>And yes!  My thoughts exactly on the expiration!  Why would the metadata 
>file by offline for 2 weeks then suddenly back? Of course I don't know 
>that these things are valid for 2 weeks - I only know the new one is.  I 
>don't know that the one I have with today's expiration date wasn't 
>downloaded yesterday.

If you read the InCommon metadata material, which is pretty extensive, I 
think it would illustrate that that's impossible.

>This morning while I was troubleshooting and saw the Windows server 
>having a hard time downloading the InCommon-metadata.xml file, I tried it 
>in curl for more insight into what was happening:

curl doesn't follow redirects by default, but the metadata providers do, 
so that's illustrative of the fact that you're not using the right URL, 
but it isn't why your IdP failed.

>There shouldn't have been any firewall changes; certainly none on the 
>Shib server itself and changes that'd affect this would be extremely rare 
>in the university firewall - and the timing for the process "fixing 
>itself" sure would be improbable.

Maybe. All I know is, when nothing else is likely, sysadmins and firewalls 
are a pretty good guess. But there should be an error in the log that's 
100% clear on why it didn't refresh, unless it just stopped refreshing. In 
that case, it's likely that it hung up at some point trying to fetch the 
file, and we found a problem with the default (lack of) timeouts, but 
without seeing the log, it's hard to say.

>Also, I'll be looking into "logback" (this one, right?  
>http://logback.qos.ch/ ).

Yes, that's the one.

-- Scott